"Killer of Sheep" was made in 1977 as the thesis project of its writer-director Charles Burnett. It never received distribution but won the Critics' Award at the Berlin Festival in 1981, and in 1990 it was placed on the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. Still, for many years it was more a legend than a cultural presence, as it was largely unavailable. But now, 30 years after its completion, it's getting a national release.

It's a worthy, fascinating film that shows the influence of Bresson and of the Italian neorealists. Filmed on location in the Watts area of Los Angeles, it focuses mainly around Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), who has a wife and children and supports them by working in a slaughterhouse, killing sheep. The slaughterhouse scenes, which were filmed in a real slaughterhouse in Northern California, are as disturbing as one might imagine.

They're meant to be disturbing. The film presents life in a black ghetto in a way that's the antithesis of Spike Lee's approach in "Do the Right Thing." Burnett shoots in black and white and eschews drama. There's no riot, no crime story -- in fact, there's very little narrative of any kind. The community is not presented as close. Life is simply difficult. There are extended scenes of kids at play, and they have little to do and little to play with except rotting boards and rocks. Stan is exhausted, depressed and disturbed by his working life and oppressed by the burden of supporting a family. He's a man of intelligence, moral decency and sensitivity who feels utterly trapped.

The great value of the film is in the way it captures life in Watts at a certain juncture in the 20th century. But the film is not only about Watts or even about the African American experience. It's about working-class life in the 1970s, and there were moments, seeing Stan sitting in his living room, collapsed into a couch and looking into space, that I flashed back to my own father and the living room of my childhood. Burnett shows us a life in which there's very little to hope for or expect, and he also shows how that hopelessness trickles down even to the small children. It's a powerful film.

It's also a film with next to no narrative, not even by the standards of neorealism, and one that's slow, without the compensating mystical grandeur of Bresson's best work. But Burnett has his own virtues. His use of classical compositions and classic blues to underscore scenes give moments an emotional reverberation, and ultimately, there's just no mistaking the film's importance. Likewise, there's no mistaking the contribution of Sanders, whose stern but humane face is the movie's locus of truth.